demanding burial. 'Risen from humble beginnings' is perhaps a buried metaphor; 'wading to their places through blood' is a dead one. It has been used so often that it jades instead of horrifying us; it is a corpse that fails to make us think of corpses. But in the next sentence the writer returns to the metaphor of rising and elaborates it so that it is no longer buried, though certainly dead. We are vaguely aware of the sense of this passage, but the metaphors are a hindrance, not a help, to our understanding of it.

Writers fall into habitual metaphor when they fear that their thought will seem too commonplace without ornament; and, because the motive is unconscious, they choose metaphors familiar to themselves and their readers. The article from which I have quoted contains many such metaphors. Mr. Lloyd George is 'like other men only cast in bigger mould'. He is 'clearly no plaster saint'. 'You cannot think of him in relation to the knock-out blow except as the man who gives, not receives, it.' 'He has never lost his head on the dizzy height to which he has so suddenly attained. He is clearly in no danger of the intoxicating impulse of the people who find themselves for the first time on great eminences, to leap over. In a word, he is not spoiled.' Here the writer, as he would put it, gives himself away. All that metaphor means only that Mr. George is not spoiled, and the fact that he is not spoiled would be established better by instances than by metaphors.

Then we are told that some of Mr. George's feats 'seem to partake of the nature of legerdemain'. 'He sways a popular assembly by waves of almost Hebraic emotion.' 'No man has ever had his ear closer to the ground and listened more attentively to the tramp of the oncoming multitudes.' He 'held Great Britain's end up' at the International conference. A 'magnificent tribute was paid to him by Earl Balfour' but it 'did not put him alone on a pinnacle'. And then we read of the whirligig of time, of 'clouds of misunderstanding which point to the coming of a storm'; of how 'foreign nations suddenly became aware that a new star had swum into the world's ken'; of how 'the situation of this country is perilous with so much Bolshevik gunpowder moving about', and how 'it has required a strong heart and a clear head to keep the nation from falling either into the sloughs of despond or the fires of revolution'.

Some of these are metaphors that were excellent in their first use and original context; but they lose their excellence if repeated in any context where they have not been discovered by the emotion of the writer but are used by him to make a commonplace appear passionate. Then they seem an unfortunate legacy from poetry to prose; and it is a fact, I think, that our prose now suffers from the richness of our past poetry. Even the prose writers of the Romantic movement regarded prose as the poor relation of poetry; they did not see that prose has its own reasons for existing, its own state of being and its own beauties. They had the habit of writing about Shakespeare in Shakespeare's own manner, which, in later plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, is often a fading of one metaphor into another so fast that the reader's or listener's mind cannot keep pace with it:

     O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
     The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
     That life, a very rebel to my will,
     May hang no longer on me: throw my heart
     Against the flint and hardness of my fault;
     Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder.
     And finish all foul thoughts.

The metaphors here, though instinctive rather than habitual, are excessive even for the dying speech of Enobarbus. The style is the worst model for prose, yet it has persisted as a mere habit in the prose of writers who fear to be prosaic and who are prevented by that habit from saying even what they have to say.

The principles of composition, whether verse or prose, are based on the fact that the unit of language is not the word, or even the phrase, but the sentence. From this it follows that every word and every phrase gets its meaning from the sentence in which it occurs; and so that words and phrases should be used freshly on each occasion and, as it were, recharged with meaning by the aptness of their use. Every sentence should, like a piece of music, establish its own relation between the words that compose it; and in the best sentences, whether of prose or verse, the words seem new-born; like notes in music, they seem to be, not mere labels, but facts, because of the manner in which the writer's thought or emotion has related them to each other. But habitual metaphor prevents this process of relation; it is the intrusion of ready-made matter, with its own stale associations, into matter that should be new-made for its own particular purpose of expression. Phrases like—The lap of luxury, Part and parcel, A sea of troubles, Passing through the furnace, Beyond the pale, The battle of life, The death-warrant of, Parrot cries, The sex-war, Tottering thrones, A trail of glory, Bull-dog tenacity, Hats off to, The narrow way, A load of sorrow, A charnel-house, The proud prerogative, Smiling through your tears, A straight fight, A profit and loss account, The fires of martyrdom, The school of life—are all ready-made matter; and, if a writer yields to the temptation of using them, he impedes his own process of expression, saying something which is not exactly what he has to say. He may, of course, attain to a familiar metaphor in his own process of expression; but if he does, if it is exactly what he has to say, then it will not seem stale to the reader. Context may give life to a metaphor that has long seemed dead, as it gives life to the commonest words. If an image forces itself upon a writer because it and it alone will express his meaning, then it is his image, no matter how often it has been used before; and in that case it will arrest the attention of the reader. But the effect of habitual and dead metaphor is to dull attention. When a phrase like 'the lap of luxury' catches the eye, the mind relaxes but is not rested; for we are wearied, without exercise, by commonplace.

Further, the use of dead metaphor weakens a writer's sense of the connexion between mood and manner. All the metaphors which I have quoted are fit for the expression of some kind of emotion rather than for plain statement of fact or for lucid argument; yet they are used commonly in statements of fact and in what passes for argument. Indeed one of their evils is that they make a writer and his readers believe that he is exercising his reason when he is only moving from trite image to image. If eloquence is reason fused with emotion, writing, or speaking, full of dead metaphors is unreason fused with sham emotion. I add in illustration a further list of dead metaphors lately noticed: 'Branches of the same deadly Upas Tree. Turning a deaf ear to. The flower of our manhood. Taking off the gloves. Written in letters of fire. Stemming the tide. Big with possibilities. The end is in sight. A place in the sun. A spark of manhood. To dry up the founts of pity. Hunger stalking through the land. A death grip. Round pegs (or men) in square holes. The lamp of sacrifice. The silver lining. Troubling the waters, and poisoning the wells. The promised land. Flowing with milk and honey. Winning all along the line. Casting in her lot with. The fruits of victory. Backs to the wall. Bubbling over with confidence. Bled white. The writing on the wall. The sickle of death. A ring fence round. The crucible of. Answering the call. Grinding the faces of the poor. The scroll of fame.'—A. CLUTTON-BROCK.

IRRELEVANT ALLUSION

We all know the people—for they are the majority, and probably include our particular selves—who cannot carry on the ordinary business of